1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to digital information storage, and more particularly, to a computer system having a disk drive with a hidden partition for storage of a disk-drive selected application.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Traditionally, a disk drive provides a nonvolatile disk media for storage of user and application information under exclusive control of a host computer. The host computer generally operates under the control of an operating system that may or may not be stored on the disk drive. During manufacture, the disk media is generally divided into a disk management partition and a general user partition. The disk management partition is accessed using commands commonly referred to as xe2x80x9cnativexe2x80x9d commands and holds information related to the configuration of the disk drive and the physical format of the disk media. The information in the disk management partition generally remains unaltered after the disk drive is shipped from the manufacturer.
The general user partition must be partitioned into one or more logical drives and logically formatted before information is stored on the partition. The partitioning and formatting process generally destroys any existing information stored in the general user partition. The host computer stores information in and reads information from the user partition by issuing host commands, generally industry standard commands, that specify the location of the information being accessed.
The disk drive manufacturer may logically partition and pre-format the disk media and store information on the general user partition for later execution by the host computer before shipping the disk drive. However, the manufacturer""s information may be deleted by an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or by an end user, or destroyed during a subsequent partitioning and formatting process.
Accordingly, there exists a need for permitting a disk-drive manufacturer to store information, for later execution by a host computer, on the disk media that may not be deleted or destroyed during a subsequent logical partitioning and formatting process. The present invention satisfies this need.
The present invention may be embodied in a computer system, and related method, having a host computer coupled to a disk drive having a host interface subsystem for processing host commands received from the host computer. The host interface subsystem includes a user partition, a drive management partition, and a disk-drive-selected application partition. The user partition stores data for execution by the host computer and the drive management partition stores data for execution by the disk drive. The disk-drive-selected application partition stores data for execution by the host computer in response to a drive-determined condition. The host interface subsystem further includes a user command interface, and first and second drive management command interfaces. The user command interface processes first host commands directed to storing data in the user partition according to an industry standard interface protocol. The first drive management command interface processes second host commands directed to storing data in the disk drive management partition according to a first disk-drive command protocol. The second drive management command interface processes third host commands enabling data storage in the disk-drive-selected application partition according to a second disk-drive command protocol.
In more detailed features of the invention, the drive-determined condition may be based on an application-installed flag indicating whether data in the disk-drive-selected application partition has been installed in the user partition for execution by the host computer, or based on a count of the occurrence of predetermined disk-drive events. The data stored in the drive management partition may include disk-drive configuration and physical format data and the data stored in the user partition may include an operating system and user applications. The second disk-drive command protocol may include a command for opening access to the disk-drive-selected application partition and a command for closing access to the disk-drive-selected application partition. The host commands for opening and closing access may include an access code particular to a manufacturer of the disk drive. The industry standard interface protocol may include a command to vary the size of the user partition available to the host computer""s normal file system.